Leaving Mundania (30 page)

It is hard to explain the bonds that a larp can set into place. As one of the Cthulhu players put it, “No one else will get it when you talk about it later” because larp is a strictly “you had to be there” kind of event. Although I hadn't really played this game, afterward I felt a deep fondness for everyone who had contributed to the game and helped me run it. I had needed the larp community's help, and they had turned up with latex wounds, fake blood, boffers, and imaginations ready to help me give the experience of larping to people none of them had met before. There is no way I could have put on a larp without them. The players had faced death together and come out on the other side, a bond between them that won't be easily forgotten. Brendan, Jeramy, Gene, Liz, and I had faced a possible real-life disaster together, and they had come through for me, like friends do, filling in for my ineptitudes. We had been a true team, with each person's best qualities shining through. Mine were planning and organization, theirs were skills at improv, plotting, and aesthetics. Larp itself created the bond among us, and one that has proven enduring. Cthulhu may have destroyed the house, killed most of the characters, and driven the rest insane, but this vortex of horror had only confirmed the bonds of friendship and mutual interest within the GM team.

*
A phrase Cthulhu cultists chant in Lovecraftian tales, possibly meaning “Cthulhu waits.” It is an abbreviation of “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn,” which means, “In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

A
few months after Cthulhu fhtagn-ed in Cape May, I hopped a plane to Copenhagen to attend Knudepunkt, a yearly gaming convention focused on arty larp that rotates its way around Denmark, Sweden (Knutpunkt), Finland (Solmukohta), and Norway (Knutepunkt), changing its name according to the local language. Literally, Knudepunkt translates to “nodal point” or “knot point” though it means something like “hub” or “junction.” Lucky for me, at the actual convention everyone speaks English.

When I left New Jersey, I wasn't feeling particularly adventurous. In fact, after a couple years studying the stateside larp scene, I felt jaded, doubtful that I'd learn anything new abroad. And yet here I was, humoring myself, curious about the famous Nordic avant-garde scene. I'd heard all sorts of rumors about Scandinavian larp, that the gamers were crazy hard-core, ran games that lasted for an entire
week, built working medieval villages, and shunned those who wore machine-made moccasins or elasticized underpants. I'd heard that larp wasn't stigmatized abroad, that shockingly, larpers managed to get government funding for games. And I'd heard that the games themselves weren't even fun, that this scene was so avant-garde that, for example, getting some people together to act out the final hours before an alcoholic's death wasn't unheard of. It turned out that the rumors had some truth to them. After spending some time reading up on the Nordic scene I concluded that to high-art larpers, my Cthulhu Live game might be considered cute. If my game were a fluffy bunny, arty Nordic larp would be the secret policeman executing your first-born—but for artistic reasons. Discovering the Nordic scene felt like reading James Joyce or Gertrude Stein after spending a lifetime on fairy tales. The arty Nordic games can be seriously high-concept. If stateside larp is
Lord of the Rings, Nancy Drew,
and
Star Wars,
then Nordic larp is
Mrs. Dalloway, 120 Days in Sodom
(I am not kidding; some Nordic gamers once ran a game based on this), and
Schindler's List.
The Nordic scene is proof that fun is not a necessary or essential component of larp, proof that the hobby can sustain high-art aspirations.
*

I spent nine days in Denmark learning about Nordic larp culture. Before Knudepunkt officially started, I participated in A Week in Denmark, six days of organized games, touristing, and parties that convention organizers ran to acclimate out-of-towners to local gaming culture. My Nordic larp adventure began with a six-hour tango lesson I attended mere hours after my jet-lagged self touched down in
Copenhagen. I had signed up for a game called In Fair Verona, which required its players to attend a workshop before the game in typical Nordic fashion. In Verona, characters used dance, not boffers or card pulls, to interact with one another, and so at the workshop, we learned how to tango and used it to develop characters.
¹

About twenty of us, half women and half men, met with GMs Tue Beck Saarie and Jesper Bruun in an oblong dance studio. They warmed us up with some silly games and then taught us the moves. At first, we moved in couples, walking side-by-side, and from there we graduated to dance steps performed in a variety of embraces, swapping partners with each song. As we learned the steps, Tue and Jesper talked to us about how physicality could convey character personality. We practiced dancing lightly and heavily, as if we were slump-shouldered introverts and extroverts cruising for a new date. The studio dance floor was partitioned with masking tape, creating a five-foot-wide aisle on either side of the studio's long sides, aisles which were, in turn, partitioned into a number of smaller “rooms,” representing the game's setting, a street in New York City's Little Italy ghetto of the 1920s. We practiced dancing up and down the length of the studio and also inside the small, masking-tape rooms.

With the dance moves somewhat under our control, we moved into character creation, a process that involved neither a thousand-page-long rule book nor any set of statistics. Each player had brought one or two period-appropriate props from home, which were laid out on a table. I had brought a lacy black scarf, but there were also hats with black netting, a rosary, a gun, a top hat that could be compressed to flatness, an exotic necklace, and a wooden fan, among many other items. Each of us selected a prop from the table as inspiration. The character description, Tue and Jesper told us, didn't have to be a history but could be a list of key words or a drawing of how we thought the character might look. We repeated the procedure with a second prop. Next, we paired up a couple times, talking about the characters and swapping away one of our sheets until everyone had a role they were happy with. I ended up with a matchmaker I'd written based on a tiny glass bottle of perfume I'd snagged from the table. It looked like a love potion to me. As a professional observer, I find it difficult to
invest myself into the moment, and since the theme of In Fair Verona was love, I thought that casting myself as a matchmaker would give me plenty of reason to interact with others during the game.

Next, our GMs poured many slips of paper onto the ground and told us each to take one. The slips had character dilemmas written on them, coupled with two outcomes, a positive outcome—what would happen if your character overcame the dilemma—and a negative outcome—what would happen if your character failed to change. We split into groups to discuss how to integrate these dilemmas into the characters we'd written and then repeated the procedure with a second slip of paper, choosing the dilemma that fit best. My character's flaw was that she thought her view of the world was correct and preached about it to others. If she overcame this flaw, she'd be open to new relationships, but if she didn't, she'd become irrelevant.

Next, we developed the social milieu of the street through dancing. We paired up at random for dances representing positive, negative, and oppositional relationships. As we danced, we talked to our partners, sussing out the details. My positive relation was with another American, playing a watchmaker who wanted to join the Mafia. We agreed that he was my godson and that I would try to dissuade him. I had a negative relationship with an out-of-work artist, a former client of mine who had failed to marry the woman I'd set him up with, bringing my matchmaking ability and taste into question. The local Catholic priest and I had an oppositional relationship—I thought he was uptight, and he thought I promoted lasciviousness, but at the end of the day we shared a common goal: to marry off the single folk.

With that, our pregame workshop ended, and after a raucous dinner at the community house, the base of operations for A Week in Denmark, I went to sleep in a basement room along with perhaps twenty other foreigners—Swedes, Frenchmen, Germans, Israelis, Czechs, and Finns. It was the only full night of sleep I got all week.

The following morning, In Fair Verona reconvened for the second part of the workshop. After warming up with some tango, we made a status line with bum characters at one end and the highly educated rich at the other. You could negotiate with your neighbors to move
up or down. As a businesswoman, my matchmaker fell somewhere in the middle. We danced with partners who were near to us on the status line to gain two more relationships. Finally, we divided ourselves into groups according to status. Tue and Jesper gave us masking tape and instructed us to create hangouts for our characters. A dockworker, a writer, a café owner, and I decided our haunt would be a café. Around us, we saw other rooms being made. The tony end of town held a church/school, a flower shop, and some private space, where characters could go to be alone. The other end of the room, the poorer side of town, included a speakeasy with a shady back room, an alley, and a place under a bridge, complete with a tiny masking-tape octagon that represented a fire in a trash barrel. On Tue and Jesper's advice, we also included a sleazy motel room at that end of town. We all knew what dancing in there would mean.

With that, my first pregame workshop ended, and we broke for lunch. The pregame workshop is a typical Nordic practice and allows the players to get comfortable with one another. Sometimes the workshops include lessons on the philosophy of the game world, including feminist philosophy or the politics of a historical era. Sometimes workshops include lessons in physical game mechanics. And GMs often use workshops to help players develop character concepts and webs of relationships. The inclusion of workshops in Nordic games represents a key difference in attitude between American and Nordic organizers. Most American larps follow a CEO-style model with someone like Knight Realms' James C. Kimball at the helm, imagining the game universe, creating rules for it, and fleshing out its history and culture. American GMs typically present a fully formed reality with concrete, planned plot obstacles for players, whose characters generally enter the game without an elaborate network of ties to the in-game community. The players arrive ready to be entertained, ready to go on a quest, and prepared to grab some part of the main plot for themselves, prepared to steal a moment in the limelight. The Nordic style of workshopping seems socialist in comparison. Through workshopping, players help create the world of the game by forging relationships among themselves and, in Verona, quite literally by inventing the shops along the in-game street. Similarly, the
responsibility for the in-game action sits more firmly on the players than it does in American larp. Nordic GMs rarely create plots for the players to pursue or solve; rather, they set up the scenario and step back—it is up to the players to create their own fun and to embark on their own emotional journeys.

The In Fair Verona workshop accomplished several objectives: it taught us the core game mechanic, the tango; it developed relationships among us as characters and as people so no one had to feel like the new kid in the lunch room; it offered each character a possible emotional arc, a character goal to reach or reject, and in doing so, the workshop dispersed what might be thought of as the traditional larp plot (no invite-only mods here); and finally, the workshop invested us in the world we created together and set our expectations of what might happen during the game. In short, the workshop helped avoid some of the pitfalls of more conventional, stateside larp by giving us full, round characters who would arrive at the game already enmeshed in the community.

During the lunch break we got into costume, supplementing what we'd brought with spare items from the props table. Meanwhile, Tue and Jesper set up the dance studio, covering the windows with cloth so that the room's only light emanated from the theatrical lamps they'd set up, spotlighting certain rooms and allowing others to remain shadowed. The sleazy motel room got lit with a red light, the better to indicate its symbolic, in-game purpose.

The game's actual rules were incredibly simple. Since these characters worked out their emotions through dance, to refuse a dance, even with someone your character hated, was forbidden. We would play out three acts, each of which lasted a preset number of songs. The GMs would light candles during the last few dances of each act to let us know the end was nigh. Sometime during the first act, we had to dance with our negative relation, a move that should catapult our characters into their predetermined crises. During the second act, we would explore our character dilemmas, and in the third act we'd drift toward our positive or negative outcomes. Anyone who felt unsure about where their character was going could request a dance with Tue. The theme of the game was love, so we should be actively seeking
love, Tue and Jesper told us, and most of us should find it during the course of the game.